Sounds like a good argument for using a CDN. Or to phrase it more generally, an intermediary that is as close as possible to the host experiencing the fluctuat

Sounds like a good argument for using a CDN. Or to phrase it more generally, an intermediary that is as close as possible to the host experiencing the fluctuating bandwidth bottleneck, while still being on the other side of the bottleneck. That way it can detect bandwidth drops quickly and handle them more intelligently than by dropping packets - for instance, by switching to a lower quality video stream (or even re-encoding on the fly).